Assessment during professional development

If you are running a professional development session for teachers, and you recognize that teachers are learners, how are you assessing their learning? Are you embedding formative assessment within your workshop? Are you providing an option for summative assessment of the learning, either at the end of the workshop, or in a follow-up session?

While I don’t think you should be giving grades to teachers for workshops, you do need to provide some way for your participants to receive feedback on what they’ve learned. Feedback in some form while learning is critical. Otherwise, how do you know your participants are learning anything?

2 Comments

A Head of School I work with suggested that we should run meetings for adults the same way we run classes for students:

1) Justify why this topic is (useful for YOU to master)/(important for our organization)
2) What specific aspect(s) of this topic are we working on today?
3) Mini lesson – quick demonstration, starting question, and/or initial dataset
4) Participants practice the skill, discuss the question, analyze the data
5) Each participant/group demonstrates/defends their mastery/conclusions to all
6) Some quiet time for each participant to record key points and follow-up needed, process what has taken place
7) How could we have made this segment more effective? What should we do differently next time?

Step 4 can provide the formative assessment for participants in the form of constant feedback from group members or the instructor.

Step 5 provides the summative assessment for participants on Skills/Concepts/Content, as each participant (or group) reports out to all (and possibly receives feedback or a “critique” from all too).

Step 7 provides a summative assessment on Process for the instructor and the participants – after all, the meeting/class was a joint effort in which everyone played a role.